Branwell Bronte: Poet of Industry 1840-46

The title is misleading in so far as very little of Branwell’s poetry took much notice of the age he lived in or even of specific locations.  A poem entitled ‘Thorpe Green’ consists of memories of lost love not a description of the place in the lowlands near York where he was tutor.  Much of his poetry is dramatic verse spoken by the inhabitants of the imaginary land Angria, created by him and his sister Charlotte.   There are however a few significant exceptions, especially the poems in the notebook he kept whilst a railway clerk at Luddenden Foot.

Although, or perhaps, because Patrick Branwell Bronte grew up alongside the Yorkshire Industrial Revolution his poetry reflects ‘timeless’ Romantic concerns of mortality and morality.  His poetry mostly ignores the factories being constructed in the valleys around Haworth and the railways extending their lines to serve new markets.  Instead he wrote poems about landscape and mood, usually modelled on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge.  

The sonnet ‘Black Comb’ gives a typical example of his interest in landscape. 

Far off and half revealed, ‘mid shade and light,

          Black Comb half smiles, half frowns; his mighty form

   Scarce bending into peace, more formed to fight

              A thousand years of struggles with a storm.                4

The hill is personified throughout, though the metaphors are unoriginal (‘half smiles, half frowns’) and the poem ends with a Romantic generalisation: ‘While we are lost who should know life so well’.

Black Combe, a fell on the west coast of Cumbria, four miles from the Irish Sea

If this is Black Combe, the mountain on the edge of the Lake District, then Branwell is metaphorically trespassing on Wordsworth’s territory.  Black Combe was where Wordsworth claimed "the amplest range of unobstructed prospect may be seen that British ground commands." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Combe  As Branwell’s modern editor Tom Winnifrith has pointed out this ‘trespassing’ can be intellectual,  reaching the point of pastiche or plagiarism.   Ironically this strain is especially pronounced in the poem Branwell sent to Wordsworth himself for comment in 1837: ‘The Struggles of Flesh with Spirit Scene I – Infancy’.   (The Poems of Patrick Branwell Bronte, New York University Press, London, 1983).   Perhaps Branwell thought imitation was an acceptable form of flattery to be offered to Britain’s most famous poet.   Wordsworth, however, did not reply to Branwell’s letter or comment on the poem.

https://www.livingnorth.com/yorkshire/people-places/forgotten-bront%C3%AB

Three years later the Industrial Revolution caught up with Branwell, despite his poetic aversion to the modern world.  At the age of 23 he obtained work as a clerk in Sowerby Bridge station, having failed to establish himself as a painter in Bradford.

Sowerby Bridge Station.  

A building dating back to Branwell's Day has been restored as a tea-room and given a plaque:

He got promoted to clerk at Luddenden Foot but lost his job at the end of 1841 when the Manchester and Leeds Railway found accounting discrepancies. http://kleurrijkbrontesisters.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/uit-het-boek-brontes-van-juliette.html

There is still a Station Road at Luddenden Foot and a pair of pillars but the station itself is gone.

 Pillar and old entrance road to station (now a bus depot).          The right-hand pillar stands isolated.

       The left-hand pillar is to the left of the white car.

He appears not to have been a punctilious worker; the place mostly associated with him locally is the Lord Nelson Inn which, to be fair, offered a library as well as alcohol.  What is not often stressed is the distance between the Lord Nelson, in Luddenden and the station at Luddenden Foot.  The best part of a mile separates the two buildings; Branwell could not have nipped out for a quick half and been back again before anyone realised.

The Lord Nelson Inn, Luddenden

The poetry notebook that is preserved from his time at Luddenden Foot shows Branwell recording a more direct interest in the industrial and contemporary life around him than in his Angrian or ‘Wordsworthian’ poems.

One poem is simultaneously patriotic and moralistic.   Originally called ‘Lord Nelson’ it is a poem in epic couplets discussing Nelson’s life in terms of not only his victories over Britain’s enemies but also over his wounds.   Branwell later retitled the poem ‘The Triumph of Mind over Body’ to stress this aspect. 

The poem opens by laying out the frailness of human mind and body:

Man thinks too often that the ills of Life,

  Its fruitless labour and its ceaseless strife,

         Its fell disease, grim want and cankering care,

                   Must wage against spirit a successful war;               4

before tracing how Nelson transcended these limitations.

By line 247 a more contemporary note enters the poem as Branwell responds to the pace of industrial change, though in abstract terms:

      I know this world, this age is marching on;

              Each year more wondrous than its parent gone;

And shall I lag behind it sad and slow?

              With wish to rise but void of power to go?  250

The characterisation of ‘year’ through the word ‘parent’ may inadvertently remind readers that Branwell’s father Patrick was a poet too.    Patrick published a volume entitled Cottage Poems, an achievement his son struggled to live up to or surpass.    Two further ironies attend the poem.  The first is that the Lord Nelson Branwell knew most about was the pub not the man.   The second is that the poem was originally signed ‘NORTHANGERLAND’.  

Percy, Duke of Northangerland was one of the leading protagonists of Angria, a part-Miltonic and part-Byronic figure also known as ‘Rogue’.    The use of the pseudonym shows the difficulties Branwell faced moving from an imaginary land in which he could create a powerful alter ego and a world in which he was nothing more than a failed painter and a railway clerk.

‘Morley Hall, Leigh, Lancashire’ was written in 1846, five years after Branwell’s sacking.   His friend J B Leyland proposed that he should create a medallion portrait of Branwell in exchange for an epic poem that Branwell would write on the history of Morley Hall, for Leyland believed that the Leylands who had owned the hall were his ancestors.   Characteristically Branwell started but did not finish the poem whereas Leyland completed the portrait medallion.

(see http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vM0EFuJDEEw/Tsp-YlJdY0I/AAAAAAAAYR4/8ChtzZIvNUA/s320/branwell.jpg)

From a Social Realist point of view the most significant part of what Branwell did complete are the lines that describe how the old manor house is being overshadowed by the ‘encroaching’ industrial expansion of Lancashire.  Though not absorbed by suburbs, the site now sits south of the Bridgewater Canal and the A580 near an aggregates quarry.

  https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.4897567,-2.468323,819m/data=!3m1!1e3

In Branwell’s version the scene is moralised as the conflict between antiquity and Mammon (materialism):

 So Manchester and Liverpool may wonder

         And bow to old halls over which they ponder

                                                                 The storied piles of bricks and mortar,

               Where trade bids noise and gain to struggle on

                               Competing for the prize that Mammon gives –               50

                 Youth killed by toil and profit bought with lives –

     Will not prevent the quiet, thinking mind

                 From looking back to years when summer wind

                         Sang, not o’er mills, but round ancestral Halls            

                                     And ‘stead of engines’ steam gave dew from water-falls.  55

At first reading ‘Youth killed by toil’ (51) might seem metaphorical but as the line goes on it becomes clear that Branwell is thinking of the dangerous and prematurely-aging work carried out in factories before health and safety regulations and ecological concerns intervened.  Haworth, for example had ‘an average life expectancy’ of ‘25.8 years; 41.6% died before the age of six’. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sanitary-report-on-haworth-home-to-the-bronts

Branwell tries to speak for those ‘pent’ in the depth of tree-less mill towns:

        He, who by brick-built houses closely pent,

         That show naught beautiful to sight or scent,

            Pines for green fields, will cherish in his room

       Some pining plant bereft of natural bloom,

                                And, like the crowds which yonder factories hold,         60

                      Wandering ‘mid warmth and in their springtide old,

So Lancashire may fondly look upon

       Her wrecks fast vanishing of ages gone,

                 And while encroaching railroads, street or wall

                                 On every side the smoky prospect fill,                          65

               She may yet smile to see some tottering wall

              Bring old times back like ancient Morley Hall.

The poem is unfinished and unrevised but Branwell appears to be having difficulties with his chosen form which perhaps discouraged him from continuing.  The syntax is often strange, and the rhymes forced (e.g. wonder/ponder 46/7, wall/fill 65/6).   The rambling sentence starting on line 56 ‘He , who by…’  seems to turn into an epic simile by the time it reaches line 60 (‘like the crowds’) and uses  ‘old’ to end line 61 for the sake of rhyme rather than sense.  

Factory next to the Rochdale Canal, Sowerby Bridge.

Typical scenery of the new industrial world being constructed on both sides of the Pennines.  

Nevertheless the poem shows Branwell to be one of the many eminent Victorians who condemned the inhuman environment of the industrial town.  Like Dickens, he appreciates those who try to create an oasis in the city, however small or frail; Branwell’s protagonist has nothing to match Jenny Wren’s roof-garden in Our Mutual Friend but ‘some pining plant’(59).  Like Ruskin, Branwell’s eye looks for some relic of the beloved Middle Ages surviving ‘encroaching’ industry (64), be it only a ‘tottering wall’ (66).  Like Engels, Branwell sees the ‘brick-built houses’ of the city as imprisoning not sheltering its ‘pent’ inhabitants (56).  However the poem shows the distance between Social Realism and Socialist Realism.  Branwell does not urge his ‘wandering’ ‘crowds’  to unionise or rebel and the focus shifts from the plight of these crowds to a personification of Lancashire who may find her spirit or essence preserved by memories of ‘old times’ (67) despite the sufferings of the masses of industrial workers. 

Nevertheless the description of the typical worker is more than condescending because Branwell had had similar experiences at the station of Luddenden Foot.  His Luddenden Foot notebook contains four poems on diverse subjects.

This first is an early version of ‘The Triumph of Mind over Body’ (see above),

The third ‘The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner’ is a poem celebrating Sir Edward Landseer’s painting The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (seehttp://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O16452/the-old-shepherds-chief-mourner-oil-painting-landseer-edwin-henry/),

The fourth ‘Luddenden Church’ is a lament for a wasted-life:

O god! while I in pleasure wiles

Count hours and years as one

And deem that wrapt in pleasure smiles

My joys can never be done

It is certainly correct to seen an autobiographical element at work here, as Juliet Barker does, (The Brontes, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Chp 13, 373) but it may be equally important that attending Ludden Church has inspired a hymn-like strain.   As a curate’s son Branwell would have been aware that, from the early part of the 19th century, hymns were spreading from Dissenting to Anglican churches. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymns_Ancient_and_Modern

The stanza would fit many Victorian tunes, such as ‘Horsely’, usually used for ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’.

 (see http://www.oystermouthparish.com/hymn-of-the-month-there-is-a-green-hill)

 Luddenden Church:  a building embodying a reassuring continuity with the Middle Ages hunched uphill at the undeveloped end of Luddenden.  

Ironically it is the other side of the road from the Lord Nelson…

It is the second poem ‘Amid the World’s Wide Din Around’ that is the most significant in so far as it directly reflects Branwell’s experience as a railway clerk.

The poem begins with the poet hearing a mysterious voice, rather like the ‘telepathic’ summons Jane receives from Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre:

Amid the world’s wide din around,

I hear from far a solemn sound,

However the poem gains the power of reportage when Branwell explores exactly what ‘din’ is distracting him from a voice that seems to come from childhood:

             I, when I heard it, sat amid              15

The bustle of a Town-like room,

‘Neath skies , which smoke-stained vapours hid –

By windows, made to show their gloom.

 The rail line next to Luddenden Foot passed through a deep cutting which would have trapped smoke and concentrated the noise of the train:

The Rail cutting, Luddenden Foot, immediately south of the station. 

The station was sited just beyond the dark bridge crossing the curve of the rail.  

The white roof marks its site.

The desk that held my Ledger Book,

             Beneath the thundering rattle shook,        20

Of engines passing by;

The bustle of the approaching train

                                                                     Was all I hoped to rouse the brain

Or startle apathy.

The rhythms and rhyme schemes are more ambitious than in ‘Morley Hall’ and the personification more subtle.  It is not only the book but the writer of the book who will have been shaken by the passing of a train (‘shook’ 20).   Some eight years later in 1848 Marx and Engels would characterise the fate of the contemporary industrial worker:  ‘He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.’ (The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, p 18 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf). 

Here one of the cogs in the machine speaks.  Branwell characterises his state as ‘apathy’ (24) and complains there is nothing stimulating about his clerk’s job except the brutal irruption of 19th century technology.  

State-of-the-art technology the Bury 2-2-0. 

This was one of the most powerful passenger locomotives running on the lines of Victorian Britain 

from 1839-1840.

http://www.victorianweb.org/technology/railways/l6.html

The solution Marx and Engels offer is the conviction that Capitalism contains the seeds of its destruction.  By contrast, Branwell, embedded within the Romantic mythology of childhood, looks backward not forward:

I heard that soft voice, known so well,

Cry – ‘Oh remember me!’           30

This might sound like the voice of an old lover, as in the case of Jane Eyre, but appears to be the voice of Childhood:

Those summer afternoons, when I

Lay basking ‘neath a glorious sky,

Some noble page beneath me spread,      35

Some bright cloud floating overhead,

These accords with the popular image of the Brontes; their childhood was one in which Nature and Books were of equal importance.  The impression is intensified when the poet recollects ‘wandering on the moor’ (40);

The hours spent wandering on the moor, 40

Beneath a grey and iron sky,

With nothing but the waters still

To break the stern monotony

Of withered heath and windless hill? –

          While fancy, to the heedless child,       45

Revealed a world of wonders wild.

                                                                         Rocking Stone,  Warley Moor

This moor, two miles north of Luddenden, has a similar landscape to the gritstone moors behind Haworth

that Branwell would have known from his childhood.   Walking across the moor leads to Haworth, about five miles to the north.

The photograph shows rough grass and pale sun rather than  ‘withered heath’ and ‘iron grey sky’ ...

This is close to a Wordsworthian childhood: 'foster'd alike by beauty and by fear' ( Prelude, 1805, I:306).  Though ‘stern monotony’ creates a different impression to ‘fear’, the poem follows a Wordsworthian trajectory when it unpacks the implicit pun contained in ‘wandering’ (40) to reveal ‘wonders wild,’ (46).  What Branwell teases out, Wordsworth is content to leave latent; ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ contains the pun in its title/first-line without signposting.

However where Wordsworth could look back on his childhood as creating the conditions in which he could become an acclaimed poet, Branwell cannot.  The poem anticipates the end of ‘Morley Hall’.  Branwell’s adult world is dominated by technological changes: ‘Each year more wondrous than its parent gone;’ (‘Morley Hall’, 248) but this world finds little use for his talents as a painter or a poet.  

‘Amid the World’s Wide Din Around’ could have ended up asking the same questions as those of ‘Morley Hall’:

And shall I lag behind it sad and slow?

               With wish to rise but void of power to go?  250

A chain-saw statue of Branwell beside the Rochdale Canal has suffered as badly as the man himself. 

It seems to have been felled since this picture was taken on 01.12.16